In my previous recent posts I've mentioned about my purchase of XP Pro for use on my about-to-be-delivered MacBook Pro.
I bought my copy at Amazon.co.uk and I thought I'd look at what was/wasn't selling on Amazon. I was amazed to see that XP Pro was indeed the top selling Microsoft OS on this site in 11th place (on all software titles). The first version of Vista was in 30th place. Only one other copy of Vista was in the top 50.
Wondering if this was a UK phenomenon, I popped over to the US Amazon site. Similar situation. This time, XP Home was in the top 25 at 15th place, and XP Pro somewhere in the 25-50 range. The first version of Vista was at 62.
I checked also at NewEgg a popular site for system builders, and it seems again that more people are buying XP than are buying Vista. Now some might argue the fact that Vista has so many versions dilutes it's position. But really there are also many versions of XP (Home/Pro, 32bit/64bit, OEM, Full,etc), and the gap in the position of XP and Vista is so significant that I do not believe that sum(copies of Vista) > sum(copies of XP).
I have always expected Vista to be a success, and I recognise that there is quite a difference in the PC world than the Mac world for doing upgrades etc. But to think that 6 months after the full introduction of Vista, when given the choice, more people are buying a 6 year old OS seems very strange indeed. That is a sad reflection on Microsoft's strategy and something that should cause them long-term worry. I know for sure that 6 months after Leopard is (eventually) released, the same will not be true on the Mac platform.
As a final aside, I did this check a day after Amazon.com had introduced a Leopard pre-order and was amazed to see Leopard in 1st place across ALL software, and Leopard family pack in 3rd place. Not only that, but even MacOS Tiger (10.4) was ahead of any copy of Vista (in 55th place)!
A visitor from outerspace would make a very different conclusion on the operating system market than is reality if presented with these figures. But, would they infer a more accurate view of the future?
Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Vista, XP, Mac OS X
Showing posts with label Vista. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vista. Show all posts
15 June 2007
Why XP Pro over Vista?
In my previous post I discussed my purchase of XP Pro. Why not go for Vista, you may ask? Is it your dislike of the Redmond monopoly again getting in the way of rational decisions?
In fact, I came very close to purchasing Vista. I wanted to see what the very best Microsoft can do is like. I also felt that a more recent OS would be more secure (and also require fewer changes - I'm not sure how many security downloads my copy of XP Pro will require immediately after install).
But in the end, Vista would have required me setting aside at least 20GB of my laptop hard disk - something that I don't want to give up. (XP should take as little as 5GB comfortably).
In addition, Vista does not work well today as far as I can tell with Virtualisation applications - especially if you also want to use a bootcamp partition. Part of this comes down to the new activation requirements in Vista which are torturous. While legal under license terms to do Virtualisation + Bootcamp (as far as I can tell) with the higher end versions, it is not practical to do so today. Also, the virtualisation solutions do not support Aero yet, so I wouldn't have been getting the full Vista experience except in Bootcamp (and probably quite hard to change between the two).
Finally, Vista is more expensive than XP Pro, and for the amount of use it will get, is just not worth it for me. I would have probably got the Ultimate version (for business use and virtualisation), but not used most of the features.
Coming up - an observation on Vista take-up.
Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Vista, XP, Mac OS X
In fact, I came very close to purchasing Vista. I wanted to see what the very best Microsoft can do is like. I also felt that a more recent OS would be more secure (and also require fewer changes - I'm not sure how many security downloads my copy of XP Pro will require immediately after install).
But in the end, Vista would have required me setting aside at least 20GB of my laptop hard disk - something that I don't want to give up. (XP should take as little as 5GB comfortably).
In addition, Vista does not work well today as far as I can tell with Virtualisation applications - especially if you also want to use a bootcamp partition. Part of this comes down to the new activation requirements in Vista which are torturous. While legal under license terms to do Virtualisation + Bootcamp (as far as I can tell) with the higher end versions, it is not practical to do so today. Also, the virtualisation solutions do not support Aero yet, so I wouldn't have been getting the full Vista experience except in Bootcamp (and probably quite hard to change between the two).
Finally, Vista is more expensive than XP Pro, and for the amount of use it will get, is just not worth it for me. I would have probably got the Ultimate version (for business use and virtualisation), but not used most of the features.
Coming up - an observation on Vista take-up.
Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Vista, XP, Mac OS X
I feel dirty...
Not because I haven't blogged for almost a month - though that, I should also be ashamed of - but, because I've just received delivery of my license for Microsoft XP Pro. Yes, you read that right.
But, do not worry, it's all in the best possible taste. I have ordered a 17" MacBook Pro and am expecting delivery next week. I will be running Windows XP on it both via BootCamp and via virtualisation. At this point, it looks like I'll be going down the VMWare Fusion route, rather than Parallels. I think VMWare is being aggressive in pricing, support and adding features as it comes from behind vs Parallels. We'll see.
I don't expect to use XP much, but I have some home automation components that haven't been updated since I stopped using an old Toshiba Libretto. My Virtual PC copies have never really worked on these items due to poor performance when doing serial operations.
I also wanted to have XP around to experiment a bit as well as to demonstrate to the great unwashed the flexibility of the Mac platform these days.
Looking back, I have bought a lot of Microsoft software over the years ranging from Multiplan, Excel/Word, followed of course by many copies of Office and Office X. I've also had Windows 95 and 98 via copies of Softwindows and Virtual PC. But these became poor when Mac OS X came along (I had to reboot into OS9 to get reasonable VPC performance).
Later this year I will undoubtedly purchase Office 2008 for Mac. I fully expect XP Pro and then Office 2008 to be the last Microsoft OS and Applications that I ever buy again.
Next up... Why XP Pro over Vista?
Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Vista, XP, Mac OS X, MacBook Pro
But, do not worry, it's all in the best possible taste. I have ordered a 17" MacBook Pro and am expecting delivery next week. I will be running Windows XP on it both via BootCamp and via virtualisation. At this point, it looks like I'll be going down the VMWare Fusion route, rather than Parallels. I think VMWare is being aggressive in pricing, support and adding features as it comes from behind vs Parallels. We'll see.
I don't expect to use XP much, but I have some home automation components that haven't been updated since I stopped using an old Toshiba Libretto. My Virtual PC copies have never really worked on these items due to poor performance when doing serial operations.
I also wanted to have XP around to experiment a bit as well as to demonstrate to the great unwashed the flexibility of the Mac platform these days.
Looking back, I have bought a lot of Microsoft software over the years ranging from Multiplan, Excel/Word, followed of course by many copies of Office and Office X. I've also had Windows 95 and 98 via copies of Softwindows and Virtual PC. But these became poor when Mac OS X came along (I had to reboot into OS9 to get reasonable VPC performance).
Later this year I will undoubtedly purchase Office 2008 for Mac. I fully expect XP Pro and then Office 2008 to be the last Microsoft OS and Applications that I ever buy again.
Next up... Why XP Pro over Vista?
Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Vista, XP, Mac OS X, MacBook Pro
23 February 2007
Vista's mere 800 applications
I find this information from Computerworld somewhat surprising on a number of levels.
First is that just 108 applications have been certified to work with Vista, and another 683 have been awarded "works with distinction" whatever that means. Excluded from the list are applications such as all of Adobe's multimedia applications, most Symantec applications, and applications such as the latest version of Skype. Given Vista's huge gestation period, I can't help feeling that this is ridiculously low. I know this doesn't mean that all the other apps WON'T work, but I'm genuinely surprised.
The next thing that struck me as surprising - though perhaps it's a (major?) contributory factor to the above is that it costs $10,000 per app to get that certification. This is clearly a barrier to small software companies, and even larger ones if they are close to a new release of software. While I understand why this was probably a costly exercise for a 3rd party to undertake, I wonder whether Microsoft has been rather silly in making this barrier so high given the end result.
It's difficult to comment too much on whether it's the application vendors being slow, or cheap, or whether Microsoft has been very remiss in not putting enough backing behind making applications compatible with Vista out of the gate (let's face it, it's now almost 4 months since the release of Vista to business). But whatever the case, I think it's a poor state of affairs.
I think there would be a lot of fuss in the Apple camp if such a situation happened with Leopard, though a fair point against this is that there is no comparable certification step that I know of. But when I think back to the relative ease of transition from PowerPC to Intel with Rosetta and Universal apps seeming to deliver a very high level of compatibility from day 1, it seems Apple's approach to working with its developers* seems to have paid dividends.
But really, what was going on while Vista trundled along in prolonged development?
* I guess given that Adobe has also been one of the slowest to respond to Apple's Intel transition may indicate that it needs to look a bit closer at its development responsiveness
Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Certification, Adobe, Apple, Leopard
First is that just 108 applications have been certified to work with Vista, and another 683 have been awarded "works with distinction" whatever that means. Excluded from the list are applications such as all of Adobe's multimedia applications, most Symantec applications, and applications such as the latest version of Skype. Given Vista's huge gestation period, I can't help feeling that this is ridiculously low. I know this doesn't mean that all the other apps WON'T work, but I'm genuinely surprised.
The next thing that struck me as surprising - though perhaps it's a (major?) contributory factor to the above is that it costs $10,000 per app to get that certification. This is clearly a barrier to small software companies, and even larger ones if they are close to a new release of software. While I understand why this was probably a costly exercise for a 3rd party to undertake, I wonder whether Microsoft has been rather silly in making this barrier so high given the end result.
It's difficult to comment too much on whether it's the application vendors being slow, or cheap, or whether Microsoft has been very remiss in not putting enough backing behind making applications compatible with Vista out of the gate (let's face it, it's now almost 4 months since the release of Vista to business). But whatever the case, I think it's a poor state of affairs.
I think there would be a lot of fuss in the Apple camp if such a situation happened with Leopard, though a fair point against this is that there is no comparable certification step that I know of. But when I think back to the relative ease of transition from PowerPC to Intel with Rosetta and Universal apps seeming to deliver a very high level of compatibility from day 1, it seems Apple's approach to working with its developers* seems to have paid dividends.
But really, what was going on while Vista trundled along in prolonged development?
* I guess given that Adobe has also been one of the slowest to respond to Apple's Intel transition may indicate that it needs to look a bit closer at its development responsiveness
Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Certification, Adobe, Apple, Leopard
30 November 2006
Microsoft's Vista will be a humongous success
You may not have expected the title to come from me, but really I wanted to state the obvious.
According to the FT, there are 8 times the number of PC's in use compared to when Windows95 was released (800 million vs 100 million). Furthermore, it has been a full 5 years since the release of Windows XP. That has to provide a pent-up demand itself. Previously, Microsoft had updates every few years, so many Windows 2000 users didn't upgrade to XP for instance, even if Windows 98 users did.
So, there is little doubt that Vista will break all records that Microsoft chooses to use to publicise its success, and we will see plenty of such mentions over the next year. And anyone fighting such statistics is basically delusional. (The only question will be whether it is "phenomenally, fantastically successful", or just "successful"; and that will depend on personal interpretation).
But Vista's release is important in many, many ways beyond just number of installations, including:
- It lets Microsoft plant a stake in the ground saying we DO understand security and we've SOLVED it - calm down. You can trust us, after all.
- In the past, you had to have strong reasons NOT to go Microsoft - you were shutting yourself from all sorts of compatibility and functionality. Nowadays, the proliferation of devices including mobiles, laptops, media extenders, and general consumer electronics, blurs the boundaries of the past. The internet and the general "connectedness" of everything means that the average user no longer HAS to go Microsoft. They increasingly have a choice again. Whether Vista is on 80%, 90% or 98% of PC's may not matter when there are many more devices than just PC's.
- It is the basis for Microsoft's one shot at dominating the living room. More than any other company, Microsoft's home strategy needs people to welcome Vista AND to actually use it the way it was intended.
Vista is MS's best shot (and a compromised, late one at that) at keeping and extending it's virtual monopoly on devices that are primarily computers. But Vista enters the market at a different time than XP. A time when a new set of competitors and new technologies have emerged. A time when we use many devices that each have a processor inside running an OS of sorts and providing various bits of functionality. A time when the OS itself no longer provides the true differentiation or, particularly of concern for Microsoft, the lock-in.
In time, Vista will be considered as the last great hurrah of the proprietary OS. There will never be a software release as significant to so many people and businesses. Even Microsoft, by all accounts, never wants something so big again. Reading some recent blog posts about how it took a team of 24 people plus managers (for a total of 43) to decide and code the Shutdown/Sleep functionality, is evidence enough that such an approach is unsustainable.
From here onwards, Microsoft's financial success will be based around how it milks it's huge (and still-growing) installed base, how it maintains the massive intertia and slows the switch away from it's dominant software, and whether it can truly make profitable it's newer initiatives. (My own views are that on 1 and 2 it will do well, and on the 3rd will continue to disappoint).
The next key battleground is in the Office software space. With Office 2007 released simultaneously with Vista, this is symbolic. Until now, anyone who wanted to co-exist in the business space would have been forced to use Microsoft Office. I know that without Office for Mac, I would not have been able to hold out on the Mac platform. The key to this was not unparalleled functionality but closed file formats. If you could not receive a Word document, edit it and send it back to be read without issue by the sender, you would be considered IT-defective. While OpenOffice has made some inroads here, and allowed Linux users some ability to co-exist, it has not been a good enough substitute for many business users for many reasons. With the Office file formats now becoming open, this barrier will now be significantly reduced - a key reason why Microsoft resisted it for so long. Between Google, OpenOffice and other similar initiatives, if the monopoly that is MS Office is broken, then that is the last key blockage towards true interoperability and collaboration across hardware and software platforms (Microsoft came close to establishing both IE and also Media Player as similar monopolies, but has probably failed to do so).
Microsoft has proven itself ruthless and astute at building monopolies and virtual monopolies, and maintaining those in the face of new competition. It has done this on the back of two dominant franchises - DOS/Windows and Office. Both were more than just compelling products - they caused problems to users who did not assimilate. That is not a way to win long-term friends and supporters. But there has been no major new technology from Microsoft that is truly outstanding and field-leading since at least XP, and possibly before that. The parallels are greatest perhaps with IBM - that indisputable champion of the late 70's and early 80's, but that remains a strong, profitable and influential company today. That is Microsoft's fate. It's timing will depend as much on it's competitors failings (e.g Sony's failure with PS3 giving XBox360 a window), as it's own management of that decline. It will no doubt have many successes in the future, but hopefully nothing that is so dominant and that results in such mediocrity from itself and the rest of the IT world hangers-on or leads to grudging acceptance from the worldwide PC userbase at large because they have no alternative.
For me personally, I expect I will buy a copy of Vista eventually to run on a Mac under Bootcamp or Parallels for the same reasons that I had an on-off relationship with VirtualPC at times. I also expect to buy Office 2008 for the Mac. But I truly expect and hope that these will be the last pieces of Microsoft software that I ever HAVE to buy.
History may well look back and see IBM as THE hardware monopoly and Microsoft as THE software monopoly. Let's hope that history doesn't write about a services monopoly, as there's only one name in the frame for that at this time.
Welcome, Vista, may the best man win (but not win big enough to be another monopoly).
Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Google, Apple
According to the FT, there are 8 times the number of PC's in use compared to when Windows95 was released (800 million vs 100 million). Furthermore, it has been a full 5 years since the release of Windows XP. That has to provide a pent-up demand itself. Previously, Microsoft had updates every few years, so many Windows 2000 users didn't upgrade to XP for instance, even if Windows 98 users did.
So, there is little doubt that Vista will break all records that Microsoft chooses to use to publicise its success, and we will see plenty of such mentions over the next year. And anyone fighting such statistics is basically delusional. (The only question will be whether it is "phenomenally, fantastically successful", or just "successful"; and that will depend on personal interpretation).
But Vista's release is important in many, many ways beyond just number of installations, including:
- It lets Microsoft plant a stake in the ground saying we DO understand security and we've SOLVED it - calm down. You can trust us, after all.
- In the past, you had to have strong reasons NOT to go Microsoft - you were shutting yourself from all sorts of compatibility and functionality. Nowadays, the proliferation of devices including mobiles, laptops, media extenders, and general consumer electronics, blurs the boundaries of the past. The internet and the general "connectedness" of everything means that the average user no longer HAS to go Microsoft. They increasingly have a choice again. Whether Vista is on 80%, 90% or 98% of PC's may not matter when there are many more devices than just PC's.
- It is the basis for Microsoft's one shot at dominating the living room. More than any other company, Microsoft's home strategy needs people to welcome Vista AND to actually use it the way it was intended.
Vista is MS's best shot (and a compromised, late one at that) at keeping and extending it's virtual monopoly on devices that are primarily computers. But Vista enters the market at a different time than XP. A time when a new set of competitors and new technologies have emerged. A time when we use many devices that each have a processor inside running an OS of sorts and providing various bits of functionality. A time when the OS itself no longer provides the true differentiation or, particularly of concern for Microsoft, the lock-in.
In time, Vista will be considered as the last great hurrah of the proprietary OS. There will never be a software release as significant to so many people and businesses. Even Microsoft, by all accounts, never wants something so big again. Reading some recent blog posts about how it took a team of 24 people plus managers (for a total of 43) to decide and code the Shutdown/Sleep functionality, is evidence enough that such an approach is unsustainable.
From here onwards, Microsoft's financial success will be based around how it milks it's huge (and still-growing) installed base, how it maintains the massive intertia and slows the switch away from it's dominant software, and whether it can truly make profitable it's newer initiatives. (My own views are that on 1 and 2 it will do well, and on the 3rd will continue to disappoint).
The next key battleground is in the Office software space. With Office 2007 released simultaneously with Vista, this is symbolic. Until now, anyone who wanted to co-exist in the business space would have been forced to use Microsoft Office. I know that without Office for Mac, I would not have been able to hold out on the Mac platform. The key to this was not unparalleled functionality but closed file formats. If you could not receive a Word document, edit it and send it back to be read without issue by the sender, you would be considered IT-defective. While OpenOffice has made some inroads here, and allowed Linux users some ability to co-exist, it has not been a good enough substitute for many business users for many reasons. With the Office file formats now becoming open, this barrier will now be significantly reduced - a key reason why Microsoft resisted it for so long. Between Google, OpenOffice and other similar initiatives, if the monopoly that is MS Office is broken, then that is the last key blockage towards true interoperability and collaboration across hardware and software platforms (Microsoft came close to establishing both IE and also Media Player as similar monopolies, but has probably failed to do so).
Microsoft has proven itself ruthless and astute at building monopolies and virtual monopolies, and maintaining those in the face of new competition. It has done this on the back of two dominant franchises - DOS/Windows and Office. Both were more than just compelling products - they caused problems to users who did not assimilate. That is not a way to win long-term friends and supporters. But there has been no major new technology from Microsoft that is truly outstanding and field-leading since at least XP, and possibly before that. The parallels are greatest perhaps with IBM - that indisputable champion of the late 70's and early 80's, but that remains a strong, profitable and influential company today. That is Microsoft's fate. It's timing will depend as much on it's competitors failings (e.g Sony's failure with PS3 giving XBox360 a window), as it's own management of that decline. It will no doubt have many successes in the future, but hopefully nothing that is so dominant and that results in such mediocrity from itself and the rest of the IT world hangers-on or leads to grudging acceptance from the worldwide PC userbase at large because they have no alternative.
For me personally, I expect I will buy a copy of Vista eventually to run on a Mac under Bootcamp or Parallels for the same reasons that I had an on-off relationship with VirtualPC at times. I also expect to buy Office 2008 for the Mac. But I truly expect and hope that these will be the last pieces of Microsoft software that I ever HAVE to buy.
History may well look back and see IBM as THE hardware monopoly and Microsoft as THE software monopoly. Let's hope that history doesn't write about a services monopoly, as there's only one name in the frame for that at this time.
Welcome, Vista, may the best man win (but not win big enough to be another monopoly).
Tags: Microsoft, Vista, Google, Apple
18 October 2006
Once a monopoly....
There is a big brouhaha going on around the blogosphere about Microsoft's new EULA (license agreement) for Windows Vista. The basic issue is that a user license (not an OEM license which is even more highly restricted) will no longer allow you to transfer the license as you see fit. You will have just one opportunity to move the license to another machine after de-activating it on the original machine it is installed on. Thereafter you have to buy another.
Credit to Paul Thurrott (who originally said it wasn't a big deal) for giving space to Koroush Ghazi who has written an excellent rebuttal of why the new EULA is actually very unreasonable and will hurt the very people that are some of Microsoft's biggest customers (and fans).
Ars Technica has posted an article on the subject too with it's usual impartiality, though I think it's being a little trusting when assuming that just because Microsoft didn't enforce some of the restrictions with XP, that it won't enforce some of them with Vista. As usual, the comments to the Ars story give a good idea about what the majority think. When the comments are 90% plus against something, perhaps it's time to take notice!
My impression is that it will hurt a lot of enthusiasts who build their own machines, as well as those who use one or more Windows environments in a virtual setup. That will include some Mac users too who wish to use either BootCamp or solutions such as Parallels to run one or more Windows environments.
Could they have done it differently? Well, yes, of course they could. It seems to me a much fairer choice would be to allow people to deauthorise a computer and then re-authorise another as many times as you wanted (within reason). That's the way the iTunes Store works.
For someone to pay good money for a software license and have it limited to only running on the next 2 computers they own (and reduce that to just one if you have a catastrophic hardware failure) seems like the Microsoft of old - taking its customers for granted. I know of no other software company that would impose such a limit on retail software. Shame on you Microsoft.
Tags: Microsoft, Vista, EULA, Paul Thurrott, Ars Technica
Credit to Paul Thurrott (who originally said it wasn't a big deal) for giving space to Koroush Ghazi who has written an excellent rebuttal of why the new EULA is actually very unreasonable and will hurt the very people that are some of Microsoft's biggest customers (and fans).
Ars Technica has posted an article on the subject too with it's usual impartiality, though I think it's being a little trusting when assuming that just because Microsoft didn't enforce some of the restrictions with XP, that it won't enforce some of them with Vista. As usual, the comments to the Ars story give a good idea about what the majority think. When the comments are 90% plus against something, perhaps it's time to take notice!
My impression is that it will hurt a lot of enthusiasts who build their own machines, as well as those who use one or more Windows environments in a virtual setup. That will include some Mac users too who wish to use either BootCamp or solutions such as Parallels to run one or more Windows environments.
Could they have done it differently? Well, yes, of course they could. It seems to me a much fairer choice would be to allow people to deauthorise a computer and then re-authorise another as many times as you wanted (within reason). That's the way the iTunes Store works.
For someone to pay good money for a software license and have it limited to only running on the next 2 computers they own (and reduce that to just one if you have a catastrophic hardware failure) seems like the Microsoft of old - taking its customers for granted. I know of no other software company that would impose such a limit on retail software. Shame on you Microsoft.
Tags: Microsoft, Vista, EULA, Paul Thurrott, Ars Technica
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